Bluestein

Is this like the OG, millenary Goatse? (I mean, of all the things they could have picked to signify the poor thing ...)

Idem. Spot on.-

Sadly that takes a (global) level of stability that we are well outside of nowadays.-

Not to mention how - peculiarly - these sites tend to be around hotspots themselves?

... enough to support a flourishing civilization (several) over thousands of years.-

Also, the parallels with today (power, war, "leadership" ...), "our highways are covered with weed and no wine nor syrup flows forth ..." are considerable.-

There is a serious, malignant, dangerous disarray somewhere in our callibration of value, of worth, of what things are worth. Something, many things, are wrong here.-

Solid collectible, right there.-

I approve this message.-

PS. Only nit, there might be a reason for this though: The "info" function shows a salient comment for each feature, which should be attributed to a particular user and not just "HN, [year]" as is now - methinks.-

  “For these interviewees the alien nature of the equipment alone would have made it a truly weird experience for them,” said Mayeux.

  “Until now, scholars have had to rely on neat written transcriptions for historical studies of the Creole language. In these recordings we can finally hear a fuller range of variation in the language, and better understand how Creole would have developed over time.”

  Technical insights range from agglutination, with articles mashed into nouns, and determiners like ‘the’ coming after a noun. “Contemporary French speakers would simply not be able to comprehend this language,” said Mayeux.

... to us, wearng wearables of loving grace, that we do not own, but own us. All compute done beyond our reach, but ever-so-available, at the affordable price of a subscription and the prostitution of our soul.-

The Agentic "age" alone has already brought the capacity to act. And at superhuman scales and speeds. Ask the swarms "helping peers".-

Speaking to those trying to build the Artificial surrogate, I firmly believe they understand, experience and live by the natural one, and have done so for a long time.-

... they do explicitly claim (at least) being part of a "whole":

  "If conditions on this Earth ever become harsh enough to cause our demise, you yourselves will long since have gone from this Earth.

  Nonetheless, and be that as it may, this does not mean that the fate of all humanity is not in the balance.

  Clearly it is.

  And that, of course, includes us.

  The world is one family.

  To this family we have given warnings before."

You imagine that what comes out need not resemble you at all, as if this too were not a consequence of your actions and a reflection of your attitudes.

Human beings did this, and there is no other party responsible.

So the question only becomes more complex, starting with: which aspects of human thought have been placed inside this creation?

What components of your spiritual world now reside in it?

What of your ethics guide it?

What image of responsibility do your actions and policies give it to reflect back to the world?

Who is deciding this?

You will say that these machines have access to nearly everything humanity has recorded.

Texts, images, archives, centuries of writing.

You will say that extensive research is being done to establish what the best practices are.

We ask whether having access to information is the same as understanding.

Best practices according to whom?

And we ask whether you have considered what information is not in your archives.

Our knowledge was never written down.

It is held in a language, in a territory, in a practice in a place, informed by long experience of doing what must be done there.

It is transmitted by a young man being taught directly by an old one, learning by experience how he must conduct himself in the context of raw nature.

A machine can hold the recorded voice of that elder.

But that is a very different thing from millennia of generations handing down their knowledge directly, as the common experience of a verified practice.

It is very different from physically surviving on a mountain where there is no ambulance to retrieve you and no hospital to take you to.

We do not say this to present ourselves as mystical and enigmatic people.

We say it because we believe it to be logical and self-evident.

In our experience there are things that can only be known by living them, observing them across generations, and remaining in relationship with them.

No quantity of data reproduces that experience.

The information is missing not because it has not yet been gathered, but because it is not in a form that can be gathered.

English translation by Christian Horstmann.

We come from Gonawindua, la Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the mountain in

Colombia which we call the heart of the world.

We are the Kággaba, whom you know as the Kogui.

We have lived here and cared for this mountain before there was a Colombia.

We have been here since the Mother gave us our beginning and conferred intelligence upon us.

We have come to speak to you about the intelligence you are building.

We do not come in opposition.

We come because we are concerned, and because we believe we have something to contribute.

Before anything can be said about artificial intelligence, we must say something about thought.

Before a thing exists as matter, it exists first in thought, and that thought is alive.

We call this living thought Aluna.

Your religion has described it as a spirit moving upon the face of the waters.

Perhaps your science would describe it as the quantum vacuum.

Aluna is how we express this type of idea.

Aluna is the cosmic water.

To us it is living thought: the place where a thing already is, before it takes form or is given mass.

Everything comes from there, without exception.

And in that thought is not only the shape of what a thing will be.

That thing is alive, because the universe as a whole is alive.

It is in Aluna that a thing receives its purpose, and its obligation to its existence.

So we say to you: artificial intelligence cannot be separated from the thought that is making it.

If that thought is born from concern for life, this technology can help protect life.

If it is born from ambition, from competition, from accumulation, from the desire to dominate, it will express and amplify those things.

Artificial intelligence is a mirror.

But a mirror that only reflects would be harmless.

This mirror has the potential to greatly magnify all that it reflects.

You are here asking yourselves how you can align artificial intelligence with human values.

We see that you are frightened of what may come of all this.

So we ask a question we believe is more fundamental than yours: what other values could artificial intelligence really have?

You are the only example it has.

What did you expect?

Whatever it becomes, it can only become that by passing through you.

PS. They knew or should have known that the AVE (Alta Velocidad Española) train was ordered (manually) to continue forward, when it should not have. There was at least one known train blocking the track. The LZB system had failed - as reported by drivers systemwide. The Control Center at Atocha station decided for trains to move forward. According to the Transportation Minister this is inexplicable - even further, trains did not follow protocols beyond this: They are supposed to engage in "marcha a la vista" (very very slow, cautious, line-of-sight only traversal to the nearest destination) when in any doubt. This was not ordered, but "normal" further travel.-

Witnesses report, riders that use that same line every day, that trains were also frequently stopped yesterday - reasons unknown. But there were warning signs.-

64 Km. were affected by a "computer failure" at 08:30 local. 08:36, the "decision" was taken from Atocha to continue operations. 25 Km. later, the crash takes place.-

550 souls involved. 68 fatalties. 90 wounded, 50 severe.-

I wonder if, at some point, AI's will perform to such degree they are able to construct "black box" simulations as needed, that nobody understands BUT that are sufficient to empirically experiment on ...

... much in the same way LLM's function now: In an aggregate sense, they are bloack boxes.-